2016/05/19 by Eskil Aursand, Magnus Aa. Gjennestad, Karl Yngve Lervåg +1 · 27 citations
Energy · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Characterization and Applications of Magnetic Nanoparticles #Convection #Ferrofluid #Heat sink #Magnetic field #Materials science #Mechanics #Nanofluid Flow and Heat Transfer #Natural convection #Physics #Solar Thermal and Photovoltaic Systems #Solenoid #Thermodynamics #Thermomagnetic convection #physics.comp-ph #physics.flu-dyn
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.jmmm.2016.05.029
published in Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials 417, 148-159 (Elsevier BV)
openalex publication_date 2016/05/19 · arxiv created 2016/05/31 · arxiv updated 2016/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The feasibility of using a thermomagnetically pumped ferrofluid to enhance the performance of a natural convection cooling loop is investigated. First, a simplified analytical estimate for the thermomagnetic pumping action is derived, and then design rules for optimal solenoid and ferrofluid are presented. The design rules are used to set up a medium-scale (1 m, 10-1000 W) case study, which is modeled using a previously published and validated model (Aursand et al. [1]). The results show that the thermomagnetic driving force is significant compared to the natural convection driving force, and may in some cases greatly surpass it. The results also indicate that cooling performance can be increased by factors up to 4 and 2 in the single-phase and two- phase regimes, respectively, even when taking into the account the added heat from the solenoid. The performance increases can alternatively be used to obtain a reduction in heat-sink size by up to 75 %.